Twenty Years, Ninety Minutes

An Empire, an Engineer and Three Dutchmen

Silvio Berlusconi had owned the football club since 1986, and by 1989 nobody bothered to pretend otherwise: Milan was a pillar of a swelling media empire, polished, broadcast and presented to the public in the flat bright light that television reserves for the things it means to sell. Italian football that year was the richest and most watched in the world, the whole peninsula ironing its tablecloths for the World Cup it would host in 1990, and into this prosperous, preening theatre walked a Milan side that would finish the year holding nearly everything a football club can hold.

The mind of the operation belonged to Arrigo Sacchi, a manager who treated the pitch as a good engineer treats a river — not something to admire, something to direct. His Milan pressed high up the field, defended with a line pushed forward like advancing infantry, and marked space rather than men: heresies, every one of them, in a country raised on the catechism of the deep defence. The team was tailored rather than assembled, every seam deliberate, nothing left hanging loose, and Italy, which understands tailoring, could see the cut of it from the third tier. Behind the idea stood the men who made it flesh. Franco Baresi, captain and libero, organised the ground in front of him the way a good foreman organises a yard, so that nothing was ever in the wrong place twice; beside him grew the young Paolo Maldini; and ahead of them moved the three Dutchmen — Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard, the last arrived in 1988 from Sporting Lisbon to complete the trio as a third leg completes a stool. It is a rare thing when theory and talent sit down at the same table. In 1989 they shared every course.

What Donadoni Brought Back

Every triumph worth the telling begins with a fright, and this one had taken its fright before the calendar turned. The fog-saved night in Belgrade the previous chapter told — the collision, the abandonment, the replay and the penalties that carried Milan through — stays where the calendar put it, and I shall not tell it twice. What belongs to this year is not the night but the man carried off it: Roberto Donadoni, the winger with the honest tradesman's face, who left the Marakana grass unconscious with his jaw shattered and his life narrowed to a thread, and who returned to consciousness in a Belgrade hospital, which is a hard city in which to wake when you cannot remember arriving.

What followed is not in dispute. Donadoni recovered. Donadoni returned. Donadoni scored against Real Madrid in April and started the European Cup final in May, and so a man who in November had nearly lost everything lifted, six months later, the heaviest prize club football owns. There is no lesson to be drawn from it and no medicine either, only the plain sequence: November on the turf, May on the podium. The game grants such symmetries rarely, and never on credit; Donadoni had paid in advance, and in full.

Five Strokes Against the Old Monarchy

The road to Barcelona was not all thunder. It had opened quietly in Sofia, against Vitosha, and after the Belgrade fright came a quarter-final against Werder Bremen conducted in the spirit of a chess adjournment: goalless in Germany, and settled at San Siro on 15 March 1989 by a single van Basten penalty — 1-0 across a hundred and eighty minutes. Great sides know how to win ugly. It is the tax they pay in advance for the nights on which they are permitted to win beautifully.

The beautiful night came on 19 April. Milan had drawn the semi-final first leg 1-1 at the Bernabeu, van Basten rising late to head the equaliser, and the president — a man who had learned in television that the public forgives everything except boredom — had reportedly demanded of his players a 5-0 in the return. Presidents demand many things and usually receive excuses. This team delivered the order to the digit. Before 73,112 at San Siro, Ancelotti opened in the 18th minute with a strike from distance, and then Rijkaard, Gullit, van Basten and Donadoni followed him to the scoresheet: five goals, five different scorers, Real Madrid — the old monarchy of the competition — dismissed 5-0 on the night and 6-1 on the aggregate. It was less a result than a lecture in five parts on what football was about to become, and all Europe took notes.

Consider what was taken apart that evening, because a scoreline flattens it. Real Madrid had won this competition six times before Milan had won it twice. They were champions of Spain in each of the three preceding seasons and would be so again in that one, and their forward line was the Quinta del Buitre, named for the vulture at the head of it. They were neither in decline nor ambushed. They were simply played off a field they had regarded as their own property for thirty years, by a team that pressed them so high and so early that the ball kept arriving back at their goalkeeper like a letter refused by the addressee. Ancelotti opening from distance was the least Milanese goal imaginable and the most necessary of the five: it informed Real Madrid that the safe places were no longer safe.

Barcelona, the Twenty-Fourth of May

And so to the Camp Nou, 24 May 1989, some 97,000 inside and the West German Karl-Heinz Tritschler holding the whistle. The opponents were Steaua Bucharest, Anghel Iordanescu's side, carrying Hagi, Lacatus and Piturca — no small inventory of talent. Sacchi sent out Galli in goal; Tassotti, Costacurta, the captain Baresi and Maldini across the back; Colombo, Rijkaard, Ancelotti and Donadoni through the middle; and ahead of them the two Dutchmen, Gullit and van Basten, riding forward like the twin prows of the same ship.

It is worth knowing who stood in the other half, because the scoreline has been unkind to them and history unkinder still. Steaua were champions of Europe themselves, three years earlier — the first club from the eastern half of the continent ever to win the thing — and champions of Romania in every season since. They were the army club, and the star in their name was the red one worn on a soldier's cap. Since 1983 they had enjoyed the patronage of Valentin Ceausescu, the dictator's eldest son, which in that country was less a sponsorship than a climate: players arrived from other clubs the way conscripts arrive anywhere, which is to say without being consulted. Under Anghel Iordanescu they had put five past Galatasaray to reach Barcelona. Gheorghe Hagi was twenty-four and already the finest footballer his country has produced; Lacatus and Piturca had been scoring in this competition for years; at right-back stood a young Dan Petrescu, whom England would come to know well enough a decade later. This was a real team, kept by an unreal state.

For half an hour it was a contest, in the sense that both sides were on the field. Then the thing Sacchi had spent two years building did to Steaua what it had been doing to Italy since August: it took the pitch away from them. Milan pressed so high that the Romanians could not turn, and moved the ball so quickly that they could not settle, and that treatment is more humiliating for a good side than for a poor one, because a good side understands exactly what is being done to it and can do nothing about it. Three-nil at the interval of a European Cup final is not a scoreline. It is a verdict delivered early, with the reasons to follow.

The two Dutchmen decided it between themselves, as if by private arrangement. Gullit struck in the 18th minute and again before the interval; van Basten scored in the 28th and then once more in the 46th, almost before the second half had drawn breath. Four goals, two apiece, 4-0: a final not so much won as declared.

It was Milan's third European Cup and the first in twenty years — the previous one belonged to 1969 — and twenty years is a long fast for a city that measures itself against its own past as sternly as this one does. Two decades of being told what the club had once been ended in an evening of being shown what it now was. Baresi climbed the steps to collect it, which was the correct arrangement: he had joined a club already sliding, gone down into Serie B with it and come back up, and he now held in his hands the trophy his boyhood had been told stories about. Some captains inherit a great side. This one stood at the door of a poor one until it became great.

And one man on that touchline had sold shoes for a living. Arrigo Sacchi of Fusignano had never played the professional game at any level worth the name, a deficiency Italian football had reminded him of at every rung of his promotion, until he produced the reply that has outlasted most of the football written about him: he had never realised, he said, that in order to be a jockey one had first to have been a horse. In Barcelona the horses ran to his instructions for ninety minutes and the argument was closed. It deserves saying plainly, because the game so rarely permits it: an outsider with a theory had walked into the most conservative football culture in Europe and been proved right in public, in a final, by four goals.

Six Months from Christmas

There is a part of that evening nobody inside the Camp Nou could see, and no honest account of this particular year can leave it out. The men Milan beat went home to Bucharest, to a country with seven months left of the world it knew.

It is a cheap trick to make a football result stand in for the fall of a government, and I decline to perform it. Milan did not beat a political system in Barcelona; they beat eleven footballers, several of them excellent, and the state that had assembled them was rotting to a timetable of its own that owed nothing whatever to the twenty-fourth of May. But the two things happened in the same year on the same continent, and a chronicle that has stood on a mountain in 1915 and in a bombed city in 1943 cannot now pretend that football is played in a room with the shutters closed. On the ninth of November the wall at Berlin was opened. In the week before Christmas the rising began at Timisoara and reached the capital. On Christmas Day, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were tried by a military court in something under two hours and shot at Targoviste. The family that had owned Steaua, and a great deal besides Steaua, was finished inside a fortnight.

Seven months, then, between the two ends of it: from a spring evening on which the dictator's son watched his father's football team lose four-nil in Barcelona, to a December morning on which there was no father, no patronage, and no such country. The footballers were left holding what footballers are always left holding, which is their careers. Hagi went to Real Madrid that summer, and later to Brescia and to Barcelona, and had a great deal of football still in front of him. That is the whole of the moral, and it is not a comfortable one: the game is smaller than the century it is played inside, and it outlives the century's owners.

Third in Italy, and the Reason Why

Honesty compels the domestic page as well, and it is less flattering. Milan, the reigning champions of Italy, finished the 1988-89 Serie A in third place: 46 points from 16 wins, 14 draws and 4 defeats, 61 goals scored against a miserly 25 conceded. The scudetto crossed the city to Internazionale — Trapattoni's record side, armoured with Matthaus and Brehme — and there is no way of dressing that sentence for a Milanese table, so I serve it plain. Yet the spring told you where this team's heart truly lived: 4-0 over Como in mid-January, a 3-1 taken away from Rome a week later, 2-0 in Florence in February, then a 6-1 demolition of Pescara and, on 12 March, a 4-0 of Juventus — Juventus! — that read less like a scoreline than a manifesto. Fourteen draws are the fingerprint of a side rationing its lungs for Europe. The purist frowns at such housekeeping. Anyone who knows what May would bring does not.

There was domestic silver all the same, and of a novel vintage. The first Supercoppa Italiana — champions against cup-holders, a fixture postponed out of 1988 by the congestion of an Olympic year — was finally staged at San Siro on 14 June 1989, and Sampdoria, through Vialli, had the impertinence to take the lead. Rijkaard replied, then Mannari, then van Basten: 3-1, and the first name ever engraved on the new trophy was Milan's, which felt then, and feels now, like the natural order of things.

The Harvest of December

The second half of 1989 was given over to the defence of everything, and it began briskly: the new championship opened on 27 August with a 3-0 win away at Cesena, the summer having returned Daniele Massaro from Roma and brought the young Marco Simone up from Como — provisions laid in for a long campaign, the way a Lombard house lays in wood before winter. The European Cup defence opened against HJK Helsinki, 4-0 in September and 1-0 a fortnight later, first steps on a road that would end the following May in back-to-back European Cups; but that harvest belongs to another chapter, and we shall not eat it before it ripens.

November and December carried the continental prize and then the planetary one. Against Barcelona in the European Super Cup, Milan drew 1-1 at the Camp Nou on 23 November and won the return 1-0 at San Siro on 7 December, Alberico Evani scoring the goal that sealed the club's first Super Cup. Ten days later, in Tokyo's National Stadium before 60,228 souls, Milan met Atlético Nacional of Colombia, champions of the Libertadores, for the Intercontinental Cup, and the match ground deep into extra time, tight as a drawn wire, until the 119th minute — when Evani, again Evani, the quietest man in the team, bent in a free-kick and was named man of the match. One-nil; world champions; and a detail for the connoisseur: two trophies of two different continents settled in a single month by the same unassuming foot.

And on 26 December, while the panettone was still on the table, came the year's last honour: Marco van Basten was awarded the Ballon d'Or, his second in succession after 1988, with a third still waiting for him in 1992. It crowned a 1988-89 season in which he had scored 33 goals in all competitions — 19 of them in the league, and ten in a European Cup campaign that no one out-scored. There are strikers who accumulate and strikers who compose; van Basten composed, and in 1989 all Europe was his manuscript.

What the Year Amounted To

What separates this year from the rest of the club's history is not the count of the silver but the certainty. Great sides are usually recognised late, by historians, once the run has stopped and can be safely measured. This one was recognised in the moment, by its victims. Real Madrid knew in April. Steaua knew by the half-hour in Barcelona. Italy had known since the previous spring and had spent a season trying to explain it away as luck, or as money, or as Dutchmen. By December the explanations had run out of parts, and what was left standing was the plain and unwelcome fact that a manager who had never played had assembled the best football team in the world out of a heresy about space.

In 1989 Milan won the European Cup, the European Super Cup, the Intercontinental Cup and the inaugural Supercoppa Italiana; surrendered the scudetto to the neighbours; and very nearly lost a winger on a Belgrade pitch before winning half the world with him. A club that had waited twenty years for Europe took it back in ninety minutes and then refused to give anything else away for the rest of the year. That is not fortune, whatever the envious muttered. Fortune wins you an evening. What Milan built in 1989 — the pressing, the line, the two Dutchmen at the prow and Baresi at the tiller — was architecture, and architecture, as this city of ours has always understood, is simply patience given a beautiful shape.